The Value Sell

The heavens are full of mysteries. These mysteries were always there, they are true, they are beautiful, majestic, and inspire us to reach out - to know more and even wonder sometimes, how we could possibly matter in such a vast magnificent universe.

The Value Sell helps people create strategic content that is designed to communicate the unique value of a company, its products or services. We strive to make content significant in our digital age. While everyone now has access to vast amounts of content and they may be confused by so much stuff, if the content is significant to them and they can find it, they will respond to it in a way that makes it their own.

Strategic content that communicates value should strive to be trustworthy and compliment upper management's strategy, which may, but not always utilize knowledge of products or customers. It makes the process difficult when the content communicators do not understand why the overall strategy is important to enabling product acceptance and customer adoption. Working together on different levels to communicate the strategic value of content can be motivating to both employees inside as well as customers outside the organization. No one will be motivated unless they believe that what they are trying to achieve is true and that it is useful.

"Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it"...Jonathan Swift in The Examiner 1710.

Now that we are firmly planted in the digital age there are lots of sophisticated new ways to enable falsehoods to spread wildly over a vast number of channels, ultimately, by simple repetition, achieving the impression of being true. Marwan Kraidy of the Annenberg School, University of Pennsylvania recently said in the Gazette "Plato's metaphor of the cave, where people mistake shadows for the real thing is on steroids in the digital age." It is becoming more and more difficult to trust what we see, hear or feel. The daily newspaper has lost its edge, and even though some of the local news may be useful, the medium is considered old school by many. Digital information is so appealing with its convenience and timeliness. So even though content can be rapidly circulated, it is difficult to know who the source was, when it was published, why, and whether it is true. And yet we still seem to consider digital the only way to go. How do you know what you are seeing is true, and where it comes from while looking at it on the web? How do you know if it is trustworthy?

Communicating value today is a dynamic process. Needs and wants change rapidly and the credibility of digital content should always be questioned. So many scams, so many false promises floating around the web, and yet most people don't seem to even care about the truth, if it is cute or funny just hit forward. Right? No wrong. We all are responsible for our actions. And spreading lies is not being responsible.The web is a great big mixed bag of all kinds of things catering to all kinds of interests- some good some bad. Digital content is not trustworthy and unfortunately this has become the nature of the digital medium.

Our minds are organized to seek and gather content that confirms our current values and beliefs. In other words, once we accept this content, it helps to manage and confirm our bias.These both contribute to a natural tendency to filter out information that does not conform to our world view. This limits or capacity for paying attention, we select and choose to focus only on content that appeals to us. Overcoming selective attention by the target audience has always been a major objective, but now with the speed and scope of digital content the challenge it daunting.